Josef's first school was the local parish school, and his first violin teacher was his father's friend Regenschori Rykl. A former Franciscan, Donulus Kora taught him Latin, and in 1806 Ressel entered grammar school in Linz. In 1809 he began a two-year study of artillery at the 4th artillery regiment in Ceské Budejovice (Budweis). He studied algebra, geometry and trigonometry. Although he was a good student, he would not be admitted to the army because he was considered too weak. In the years 1812-14 he attended the University of Vienna, aspiring to study medicine. However, he studied state accountancy, chemistry, veterinary medicine, agriculture, hydraulics, architecture, etc.
Meanwhile, his parents became unable to support Josef any further. He made an effort to support himself and his parents with drawings and calligraphy, but had to leave university in 1814. There was a possibility for him to continue his studies at the newly founded Forestry Academy at Mariabrunn near Vienna. Following his father's advice, Josef asked the Academy for a grant, but was refused because "his lungs were too weak". His friend Jelinek, who was a servant at Court, gave Emperor Franz I a miniature of Ressel's, which represented the Battle at Leipzig in 1813. The Emperor appreciated the miniature, and paid Ressel a sum that allowed him to enrol for the two-year studies at the Forestry Academy.
Josef Ressel supported himself and his family with drawings and calligraphy until 1817, when he was appointed district forester in Pleterje. Later he worked as a forester in Trieste, Motovun and Ljubljana. In 1821 he married Jakomina Orebich from Motovun.
In the following years he was involved with screw propeller experiments, and tried to establish a regular line for the transport of passengers between Trieste and Venice. In 1829 the first steamer with a screw propeller, and about 40 passengers aboard, sailed over the Gulf of Trieste.
After his first wife died, he remarried Tereza Kastelec from Vishnja gora in 1830. He died in Ljubljana in 1857.
Ressel was the author of more than 30 technical inventions. It was not this activity, however, that marks his role in the Austrian navy, but his professional service as a forester. After 1838 he was in charge of growing and collecting the wood for the ship-building industry.
As said, his reforestation programmes were an early stage of modern regional planning. They are the first systematic professional approach to re-establishing the woods and improving the landscape of Istria and the Kras with local participation.
Historians of technology and transport do not agree on Ressel's role in the development of the screw propeller. Ressel's "Civetta" did, however, sail several years before Ericsson and Smith, the inventors stated in encyclopaedias, proposed their model of the screw propeller.
When we consider Ressel's contribution to world technology, we should take into consideration the environment he worked in. Living in southern Austria, to which only the industrial revolution opened the passage to the outer world, a country where the railway had not reached all regions, where there were no important cultural centres with big libraries, etc., Ressel was a remarkably modern thinker, interested in saving energy and raw materials. His reforestation programme still seem environmentally-friendly.
Many of Ressel's inventions did not, however, serve the needs of the time, as Austria was so distant from the centres of industrial development.
